More on Vitalism

As my students and I work through Bennett’s Vibrant Matter, I find myself increasingly uncomfortable with her vitalism. The Lucretian materialist in me is extremely uncomfortable evoking agencies and principles that are not susceptible to materialist explanation. Chapter 5 of Bennett’s Vibrant Materialism is entitled “Neither Mechanism nor Vitalism”, yet strangely we seem to get next to no discussion of mechanism and she seems to end up advocating a vitalism descending from Bergson and Driesch.

For me, I’m just unclear as to what we gain from this vitalism. The set of concerns that seem to motivate vitalism arise from a concept of matter that is purely dead such that it movement can only come to it when it is acted upon by something else. By contrast, life seems to be self-organizing, self-maintaining, and to possess agency. In many respects, this conception of matter already is at work in Aristotle’s four causes as laid out in the physics. Aristotle had argued that matter is characterized by potentiality because it can take on a variety of different forms (clay can be moulded into a vase, plate, cup, etc). Form is therefore the active principle that descends upon matter. At a metaphysical level, we thus quest the question “what is the agency by which matter takes on form?” This is a “first beginnings” sort of question about the origins of motion in the universe. We can grant that matter exists, but if it’s true that matter is characterized by potential, then it follows that motion cannot arise from matter itself. Rather, there must be some sort of outside agency that introduces form into matter. In subsequent tradition, this agency will be human beings (we form matter into various instruments) or God (god or the gods take the chaotic chora of matter, generating form or individuation in the variety of species we see in the world.

What is difficult to imagine– especially in the atomistic materialism that arises during the sixteenth and seventeenth century –is the idea of matter taking on organization of its own. Take the example of a billiards table as an example of a purely mechanical system. It is extremely difficult to imagine the billiard balls hitting one another in such a way that they take on a self-maintaining and self-organizing pattern that then strives to maintain itself across time. In this respect, vitalism becomes an attractive alternative to mechanism and theism because it allows us to imagine some immanent life-force within matter that organizes dead matter into living forms. Here we’re able to– allegedly –avoid the problems that arise from the deadness of matter without falling into theism or the postulation of a divine being that imbues matter with agency.

read on!
A couple of points here. First, isn’t this a wildly simplistic notion of matter and what is possible for matter? Second, what do we really gain by this sort of explanation? Let’s take the example of gravity. Someone asks “why do the planets revolve around the Sun?” Another person responds “because of gravity!” Here it sounds like we’ve explained something, like we’ve given the cause of orbits (gravity), but all we’ve really done is give a name to the mystery. This is how it sounds in the case of vitalism. We ask “how can there be forms of matter that are self-organizing, self-maintaining, and that possess agency?” and we answer with “by virtue of a vital principle”, yet all we’ve really done is name the qualities of life. We haven’t really evoked any sort of explanation or account.

And at issue here is whether we really need such a vital principle or creative life force at all. Take the example of a chemical clock:

Here we have a quite beautiful reaction:

What is remarkable here is the regular oscillations of these systems. Our tendency is to think mechanical systems as necessarily tending towards some sort of equilibrium state where nothing else takes place. The billiard balls scatter on the table and that’s it. But here we see something quite different. In the first Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction we get a solution on a hot plate oscillating between the colors red and blue. The trajectory of the system is not uni-directional such that it evolves to one attractor– i.e., it becomes blue and that’s it –but rather it oscillates back and forth turning now blue, now red, and back again. Initially this phenomenon might cause us to shrug and say “so what?” But think about what this means: It means that all of the molecules that make up the solution are simultaneously shifting their relations in an ordered fashion, producing regular, ordered, cyclic behavior. This is the exact opposite of billiard balls scattering on a billiard table and coming to a state of rest.

What’s interesting here is that we don’t need any “vital principle” to explain these sorts of processes. These are entirely ordinary material processes requiring no mysterious agency to take place. In this regard, rather than suggesting that there’s some sort of vital life that resides in matter, wouldn’t it be better to say– contra what Kant says in the second half of the third Critique –that matter is able to produce life? Aren’t the phenomena of life just more complex versions of these sorts of self-organizing processes and chemical clocks? The truly radical position is not to defend a sort of vitality at the heart of matter (this, I think, is a step backwards), but to vigorously defend the ability of self-organization to take place through matter alone.

this was at the heart of my worries back in your the-sorcerers-apprentice post on teaching Bennett and I’m relieved b/c as I said there it was my enthusiasm for E-Joy’s work that brought me to read Bennett in the 1st place.

Not precisely on topic, but you can substitute the mentalese with “agency”, “vital principle”, etc:

“The “mind” as “actor,” still in use in present-day psychologies and sociologies, is the old self-acting “soul” with its immortality stripped off, grown desiccated and crotchety. “Mind,” “faculty,” “I.Q.,” or what not as an actor in charge of behavior is a charlatan, and “brain” as a substitute for such a “mind” is worse. Such words insert a name in place of a problem, and let it go at that; they pull out no plums, and only say, “What a big boy am I!””
(from John Dewey, Arthur Bentley “Knowing and the Known”, 1949)

I read Bennett’s book in the spirit of your last paragraph here. Perhaps it is a little unclear what she explicitly advocates, but what you wrote in that last paragraph is more or less what I would interpret “Neither Mechanism nor Vitalism” to mean.

I took Bennett’s approach to be one that precisely calls this view into question, without then regressing to some sort of vitalism. I also think its important to note, without reverting to discredited theories, that it is still unclear what the exact relationship between matter and life is – and why one should spring from the other. I think your work (and Bennett) seems to offer an important revision to these topics.

I also think you hit the nail on the head, Levi, when you wrote: “The set of concerns that seem to motivate vitalism arise from a concept of matter that is purely dead such that it movement can only come to it when it is acted upon by something else.” I think this is precisely what Whitehead uncovered with his writings on the bifurcation of nature…and that was several decades ago…

I think you might be right about but Bennett, but I find it really hard to say. I expected the “Neither Vitalism or Mechanism” chapter to do what you suggest, but she ends up painting mechanism as the bad guy and then sides with the vitalism of Bergson and Driesch as vitalists, ie, we don’t really get a critique of vitalism, but are instead asked to continue to accept ideas like entelechy and elan vital. I’m just not willing to go there. The motion debate has actually been going on for centuries, well before Whitehead’s. One of Spinoza’s principle contributions to Enlightenment thought was the thesis that being requires no intervention of agency from the outside to account for motion (Jonathan Israel is superb on this in his book Radical Enlightenment). My problem with Whitehead is similar to my problem with someone like Driesch: the introduction of purposiveness or entelechy into entities.

“Aren’t the phenomena of life just more complex versions of these sorts of self-organizing processes and chemical clocks?”

That “just” is doing a great deal of rhetorical work. “Vitalism” may well just be a fancy label that explains nothing in itself. But, in the absence of an explicit laboratory demonstration, I’m not sure the defense you advocate is much more. Nor is it clear just what’s so radical about such a defense. Could it be that we don’t know what’s going on and that we’re arguing about where to draw boundaries in a territory we can’t even see?

Actually we’ve done quite well in the laboratory, both synthesizing complex amino acids, actually producing speciation events (in the 20 year Michigan State University experiment reported a few years ago), and in coming ever closer to generating artificial life or designed cells. The point of the chemical clocks is that we can get complex, patterned, organized behaviors from allegedly “dumb” matter thereby undermining the argument that material systems are merely like billiard balls bumping into one another on a pool table. As for what’s radical about such a defense, I just don’t think monotheistic religious leftists have really thought through what evolution is about when they claim that it can be consistent with their belief. Either they are defending a rather unusual version of Christianity where Jesus was just an ordinary man, divine in no way, that wasn’t resurrected, and that was merely a kind of sage (I have no problem with this position) or they don’t understand what evolution entails.

FWIW, back in the 17th century Huygens observed coupled oscillation among pendulum clocks attached to a common wall. That’s pretty close to dumb billiard balls.

As for what’s radical, I didn’t have anything specific in mind, but your reply on that point doesn’t tell me what’s radical. People have been talking about self-organization for years. It’s pretty standard stuff, no?

There’s quite a difference between a Newton Cradle (akin to what you’re referring to with Huygens) and a chemical clock. As for what’s more radical here, it’s my view that it is more radical to treat matter as being capable of generating organizing complexity than to look for some additional principle like a vital principle outside of matter. The former position holds that the world is enough. Given that the philosophical tradition has always found it very difficult to treat the world as enough (Spinoza and Lucretius are notable exceptions) I think that’s quite radical. We can disagree over this of course as it is a value judgment on both our parts. It’s also rather difficult to have a discussion with you on this matter as you’re taking up no position of your own so I’m unable to know what alternative you’re proposing.

It’s also rather difficult to have a discussion with you on this matter as you’re taking up no position of your own so I’m unable to know what alternative you’re proposing.

That’s because I don’t really have a position. I don’t see that my core work requires that I take a position on vitalism, so I don’t. If you put a gun to my head and told me to take a position or you’d shoot, then I’d probably opt for something like your position over vitalism. Absent the gun, I’m willing to hold the matter in abeyance.

But I AM interested in getting a sense of how the issues lay out.

You know, a bit after the end of WWII Osamu Tezuka wrote three manga known collectively as the science fiction trilogy (in order written): Lost World, Metropolis, and Next World. If you think of them as a continuous work, it’s clear that two things are going on. On the one hand he’s rethinking Japan’s place in the world. In LW Japan isn’t explicitly mentioned, but is the default setting for the first half while the second half takes place on a twin planet. In NW he has Japan politically situated between a large capitalist state and a large socialist state. On the other hand, he runs through the whole common sense ontology from matter through plants and animals to social groups and, ultimately of course, the state. It’s as though in order to reconceptualize the state, Tezuka had to reconceptualize everything.

Well, I think that’s what we’re doing now, reconceptualizing everything. Vitalism and its alternatives is just one aspect of this grand reconceputalization.